Reduplications are words or phrases that contain a duplicated element. An example is the phrase "riffraff". The two parts of the word are almost the same (i.e. "riff" and "raff"), but they have a small change (the vowels).

When you have a rhyming reduplication, the duplicated element rhymes with the original element in the phrase. A good example is "lovey-dovey".

I started thinking about rhyming reduplications recently after my friend Anne wrote a list of them on Facebook. Below is what she wrote (definitions added):